The Historians' History of the World 04

Again, it was not to these conventional tricks, in the first instance, that Plato was averse. He was logician enough to appreciate the high educational value of making thought move in regulated periods (a thing that many people overlook nowadays); but the heaven-born poet felt that this intellectual mechanism was antagonistic to the direct unconscious self-revelation of emotional experience. The thing that roused him to passionate protest was the claim laid by rhetoric to the formation of youth. This had to be begun on a fresh system, the old training in music and gymnastics being no longer adequate. The question was between a scientific and philosophical education (Plato was thinking particularly of mathematics, to which we also devote attention) and a conventional and mechanical training of the mind. There is no question that the rhetoricians provided the latter. It is rhetoric that our own schools desire to achieve by the practice of speaking and writing in the mother-tongue, and rhetoric that they formerly aimed at by speaking and writing in Latin. This Plato repudiated because it was no genuine knowledge, while the fact that the rhetorician took upon himself to talk of everything, irrespective of how much he knew of his subject, and never attempted to conceal that he aimed at effect and nothing else, appeared to the disciple of Socrates wantonly immoral. And when Isocrates, the most successful and systematic teacher of rhetoric, called his form of instruction philosophy, it must have sounded like mockery in the ears of the genuine philosopher. In youth, Plato had experienced in his own case that no poetic form was suited to portray what was to him the noblest of all visions—Socrates in converse with his pupils and with the sophists. He felt within himself the capacity to embody this vision directly by the reproductive power of imagination without any other stylistic conventionality than that of his own poetic fire. Thus in the divine madness of the poet, of which he speaks later in his Phædrus

, he found the form to suit him. This form he perfected, and created, in the height of his power, works in which we find all the merits of all kinds of poetry and rhetoric, but which are, nevertheless, something utterly apart and unique. In his old age he probably felt that the form was no longer adequate to the substance; but he did not care to abandon it; and he who has glowed with enthusiasm with the youthful Plato, in his elder years willingly gives ear to the style of his old age, because the soul within has not grown old. Great writers like Aristotle and Cicero, having safely stored this characteristic form, which was natural to one period and one person alone, in the pigeon-holes of their æsthetic system, have indeed produced admirable dialogues. They are counterfeits none the less, and it is a wholly anti-Platonic classicism which holds or would hold the dialogue to be the true, or even a particularly good, method of scientific investigation and statement. Plato’s dialogue is a miracle which will edify the world to the end of time, like Athenian tragedy and the comedy of Aristophanes; but it is specifically Athenian. This is why Aristotle at his best abandoned dialogue in favour of a plain statement of ideas. Had the efforts of Aristotle been attended with success, the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy would have been adjusted, inasmuch as rhetorical training would have received its proper and subordinate place in the philosophical education of youth. But the unforeseen expansion of Hellenic civilisation did not allow of such root-growth, and at a later period the power was wanting. In the dialogue

De Oratore

, that work which has most of the Platonic character, Marcus Cicero, though himself of the rhetorical school, renews the attempt to subordinate rhetoric to scientific training. In so doing he reproduced the ideas of his contemporaries, the successors of Plato in the Academy. The attempt succeeded neither in Rome nor in Greece. One of the strongest signs of decadence in the time of the empire is the fact that philosophy, except where it holds its own in narrow scholastic circles, has to yield precedence to rhetoric. Where the Latin language prevailed more especially, philosophy becomes no more than a part of general education; while rhetoric, thanks to an adherence to Attic models of style that grows ever closer and more difficult, becomes more and more an empty game of words that only serves to mask the internal decay which it precipitates. And yet the sight of the clinging ivy on the trunk of the dead oak is a fair one.